by KURT HACKBARTH
Last Friday in Mexico City, Morena’s presidential candidate Claudia Sheinbaum launched her campaign. In the wake of AMLO’s popular presidential term, the left-wing party looks set to consolidate and build on its accomplishments.
On Friday, March 1, Mexico’s left-wing Morena party marked the beginning of the country’s official presidential campaign season with a kickoff event in Mexico City’s central square, or Zócalo. Before a maximum-capacity crowd and following an introduction by the party’s mayoral candidate for the city, Clara Brugada, presidential standard-bearer Claudia Sheinbaum laid out a hundred-point plan for building the “second floor of the transformation.”
While many of the proposals dealt with consolidating projects already underway or under consideration — including a package of constitutional reforms sent to the Congress of the Union by President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) in February — Sheinbaum offered glimpses into how this second floor would look different from the first. It includes a greater emphasis on women’s issues, building on programs instituted during her term as mayor of Mexico City; the most eye-catching proposal was one to reduce the age at which women could qualify for the universal adult pension, with a partial payment kicking in at the age of sixty.
Sheinbaum’s platform also entails greater attention to education, culture, sports, and the arts, including health and social security benefits for artists typically left out of those systems. It offers an increased focus on preventative and mental health, including a national mental health program that encompasses victims of violence. It promises to tackle Mexico’s chronic water problems, including reforms to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)–era National Water Law that turned hydric resources over to wealthy licensees and corporations (Sheinbaum has said that water will be a defining issue of her administration). And building on Sheinbaum’s strengths as a climate engineer, it promises to drive the energy transition — not along the lines of the greenwashing model promoted by energy multinationals but within a framework of strengthened public control over the sector, which has been one of the most significant battles of AMLO’s term.
Still Such a Need for Justice
For Anglo-American audiences used to the induced apathy of major-party politics, it may be difficult to picture what it’s like when Morena sweeps into town. Hours before the scheduled event time, Mexico City’s historic city center begins to morph into a block party, with marchers descending upon the Zócalo from all sides; on the street corners, bands play and people dance. For the overflow crowd leery of joining the crush of people trying to get into the plaza, monitors are set up to give them a chance to follow the proceedings. On this occasion, some 350,000 people — close to the population of Cleveland or New Orleans — turned out on what was both a weekday and a workday.
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